Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961—1971

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center will present an exhibition of works by Lee Lozano (b. 1930, Newark, New Jersey), whose wide body of works included painting, drawing, performance, and conceptual work.

The brief but extraordinary and intense career of Lee Lozano has been a subject of rediscovery in the art world over the past few years. Drawn from Life, the first major exhibition of Lozano's work since her death in 1999, focuses on her drawings and notebook pages, with a selection of related paintings, to reveal the complexity and depth of an artist whose body of work remains elusive. With over 150 works, many never before exhibited or very rarely seen, the show will present a portrait of Lozano through explicitly humorous drawings from the early 1960s; tool paintings and drawings which led to volumetric and perforated canvases in the mid-1960s; studies for the Wave Series, a group of eleven paintings made between 1967 and 1970 which engage Minimalism, Op/perceptual art, and installation; and her last works which are among the most important, heady, and conceptual investigations of the late '60s and early '70s. By 1971, Lozano had purposely abandoned her career, rejecting the art world with Dropout Piece. More than thirty years later, her life and work is a source of continuing fascination.

Lee Lozano was born Lenore Knaster in Newark, New Jersey in 1930. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1951, and was married to Adrian Lozano in 1956. After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960, she traveled for several months in Europe, and moved to New York upon her return. Lozano's first one-person exhibition was at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1966. Subsequent exhibitions include Galerie Rolf Ricke in Cologne, Germany in 1969; The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1970-71; Lisson Gallery in London in 1971; and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in 1998. She lived in New York until 1972, moving to Dallas, where she died in 1999.

This exhibition is curated by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss and P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas, and is made possible by support from Harvey S. Shipley Miller and Susan G. Jacoby.

Special thanks also to Jaap van Liere and Barry Rosen of the Estate of Lee Lozano.